Book Review: The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Stars: 5 out of 5
Pros: "I May be Crazy, but I'm Not as Crazy as You."

Cons: "There's Never Enough Time to Do All the Nothing You Want."

The Bottom Line: "Golly, I'd Hate to Have a Kid Like Me."

"Don't Forget...At Midnight Opposite Day is Over, Okay?"  "Yes!"

I still miss "Calvin and Hobbes."  There, I said it.  Not that I will find one of the strips many fans who would disagree with me.  That's why the books, such as treasury The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes , are so wonderful.  We may not be getting new adventures for our heroes, but we can relive the old ones over and over again.

If you aren't familiar with the strip, it stars six-year-old Calvin.  He is flunking school, but he's smart enough when it comes to something he loves.  And what an imagination he has.  His best friend is Hobbes, his stuffed tiger.  Hobbes is alive when the two of them are alone.

Calvin's world is also inhabited by his exasperated parent; his 1st grade teacher Miss Wormwood; Moe, the class bully; Rosalyn the babysitter; and neighbor and fellow student Susie Derkins.

 For the first few years, the strips were released twice.  The first releases were all in black and white.  Then would come a "treasury" that would include all the content from two books with the Sunday strips in color plus an added story to entice people to buy the treasury.  This is the second treasury and includes all the cartoons from Yukon Ho! and Weirdos from Another Planet.

The book actually starts with the bonus content, an extended story where Calvin turns himself into an elephant using his Transmogrifier.  The purpose of this experiment?  To never forget his vocabulary words.  Unfortunately, it doesn't turn out quite the way he expected it to.  (It never does.)

As is usually the case, this book is a collection of the individual stories and longer stories that take a week or more to tell.  Heck, a few times the stories spill over to the Sunday strips as well, showing an amazing amount of planning on creator Bill Watterson's part.

The book covers a year and a half, roughly half of 1987 and almost all of 1988.  During that time, Calvin's family takes two camping vacations together, one in the rain and the second without his dad's glasses.  Calvin and Susie have to work together for a report on Mercury.  Calvin's cardboard box (the basis for the Transmogrifier) turns into a time machine that sends them back to the time of the dinosaurs.  Speaking of the Transmogrifier, Calvin invents a hand held version that comes in handy when he is carried away by a helium balloon.

There are other staples of the strip here.  We get many strips involving fearless space explorer Spaceman Spiff who always seems to face some danger that relates to Calvin's real world.  Calvin's alter ego Stupendous Man makes a few appearances, mostly tangling with his arch nemesis Mom Lady.  And yes, Rosalyn makes two appearances as well.  With the 1988 elections looming, Calvin attempts to get his dad to bend to his will by sharing recent polling data on "household six-year-olds."  One of my personal favorites is the day that Hobbes lies to Calvin then announces that it was really Opposite Day.

And we can't forget the stories that gave the original books their names.  In the first, Calvin secedes from the family and attempts to move to the Yukon.  In the second, Calvin and Hobbes move to Mars when they get upset with the state of the Earth's environment.

Now if you haven't figured it out yet, a healthy imagination is in order to enjoy the strips.   Even as I am reading some of the more outlandish stuff, the back of my mind is trying to explain it all.  Yet I really don't care.  This strip is so much fun I always get lost in the panels before I know it.

And yes, the strips are funny.  Thanks to heavy sarcasm, there are so many laughs between the covers.  Yes, the strips do get serious at times, and the stories don't always have a laugh every single day.  But even then, the pay off is always worth it.

Even so, this treasury is the weak link in the history of the comic strip.  I've always thought so.  Yes, there are classics here.  Yes, I laugh from cover to cover.  But it seems a bit repetitious and just not as original as the rest.  We're past the first strips when everything was new and not quite to the strips that showed just how creative a guy Bill Watterson was.  As the strip progressed, it would build on the foundation of the early years and truly go some imaginative places.

So do I recommend The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes for fans?  Absolutely!  But if you haven't met these characters, start with another book (like the first one) and come back to this one.